Visa Scores With Digital Wallet Concept and 3 Hot Stocks Making Waves

V.me, the new “digital wallet” service from Visa (NYSE:V) gets a boost as over 50 banks and credit unions agree to make it available to their customers, improving Visa’s chances of securing a larger chunk of lucrative e-commerce business. The new service makes online transacting easier for customers by doing away with the practice of entering tedious credit card details in order to make a purchase. Customers instead enter an e-mail address and a password.

PayPal (NASDAQ:EBAY) sets a target to double its share of Middle East and North African e-commerce within a period of three years. PayPal recently enabled linking of their credit or debit cards for residents in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Jordan with a PayPal account. PayPal plans to extend this facility further to neighbouring countries. PayPal claims it has a 5% share of e-commerce business in the region.

Ford (NYSE:F) operates North American plants at 114% capacity, according to vice president Jim Tetreault. Compare that with Europe, where analysts say Ford utilises only about 50% of capacity. Ford is therefore logically moving the production of its new Transit Connect Wagon to its assembly plant in Valencia, Spain. Fort recently announced plans to cut 18% of European capacity by closing three plants by the end of 2014.

Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE:ANF) announces strong Q3 results as EPS of $0.87 beats estimates by $0.28 while revenue of $1.17 billion matches analysts’ expectations. Direct to consumer sales were higher by 20% to $158.3 million. Gross margin was up 240 bps to 62.5%. “These significantly improved financial results reflect progress on several fronts over the past quarter. Our US chain store business posted healthy growth on top of a strong quarter a year ago, and we saw sequential trend improvement in our international business,” said Mike Jeffries, CEO and Chairman. Outlook for the full-year EPS is in the range $2.85-$3.00. The company declares quarterly dividend of $0.175.